Jewish Political Studies Review

Anti-Semitism In Germany Today:
Its Roots And Tendencies1

Susanne Urban

The new millennium has witnessed a resurgence of anti-Semitism in the
world, especially in Europe. Anti-Semitism certainly did not disappear
in Germany after WW II. What is new is the blunt expression of anti-Semitism
and the fraternization between left-wing and right-wing, liberal
and conservative streams. Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism continue to
spread in German society and are more and more openly expressed.

Right-wing groups and neo-Nazis are no longer the only ones who
agitate against Israel and Jews. Together with "traditional" anti-Semitism,
Germany has seen a growth of leftist anti-Semitism along with
anti-imperialist, antiglobalization, and anti-Zionist attitudes, all reinforcing
the new German claim of having been victims in WW II.

There is a widespread animus against Israel, clearly not only toward
Israeli policies, that often goes along with pro-Palestinian partisanship.
This development is intensified by anti-Israeli media coverage in
Germany, often accompanied by anti-Semitic language and images.

This "new" anti-Semitism in Germany correlates with changes in
the nation's attitudes toward WW II and remembrance of the Shoah.
Laying the blame for "immoral" conduct on Israel, and therefore "the
Jews," makes clear that "they" did not learn the lessons of the Shoah;
whereas Germans see themselves as having learned the lessons by being
watchmen against "immoral" politics.

In 1967 Jean Améry wrote: "The classic phenomenon of anti-Semitism
is taking a new shape. The old one still exists, this I call
coexistence....To be clear: anti-Semitism, included in...anti-Zionism
as the thunderstorm is part of the cloud, is again respectable....But:
a respectable anti-Semitism is not possible."2

More than thirty-five years later, it seems nothing has changed.
Although anti-Semitism masks itself above all as anti-Zionism or
"criticism of Israeli policies," its roots are pure, traditional
anti-Semitism.

The Devil in Disguise

Améry’s appeal not to become complacent toward anti-Semitism disguised
as anti-Zionism has lost none of its importance. Born in 1912
in Vienna, Améry survived the Holocaust and after 1966 worked
mainly as a journalist. His writings are responses to anti-Semitism by
someone who lost faith in the world in Auschwitz. He committed
suicide in 1978.

The new millennium has witnessed a resurgence of anti-Semitism
in the world, especially in Europe. There is a clear link to the terror
war in Israel, and a widespread animus against Israel (not just Israeli
policies) and Diaspora Jews along with pro-Palestinian partisanship.
This development is intensified by anti-Israeli media coverage including
the use of anti-Semitic language and images.

In Germany, anti-Semitism certainly did not disappear after WW
II. What is new is the blunt expression of anti-Semitism and the
fraternization between left-wing and right-wing, liberal and conservative
streams. Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism continue to spread in
German society.

Anti-Semitism in Germany, 1945–2004

Anti-Semitism appears to be an essential part of the European cultural
tradition, and in Germany, more or less conscious Jew-hatred exists
by "tradition" as well. Former East Germany, and before that the
Soviet Occupation Zone, never conducted a survey of anti-Semitism,
and no data is available. Such surveys were, however, conducted in
West Germany. In 1949, a quarter of the West German population
described themselves as anti-Semites; in a 1952 survey, one-third said
they were definitely anti-Semites.3

By 1980, however, the tracking of various population samples
showed that anti-Semitism had decreased. Surveys conducted after
the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 revealed a huge gap in anti-Semitic
attitudes between East and West Germany.4 Surprisingly, East Germany
appeared to be very congenial to Jews with almost no anti-Semitism.
This, however, was a fallacy related to the fact that many
people and even researchers make a facile distinction between anti-Semitism
and anti-Zionism, despite the fact that scholars from the
Centre for Research on Anti-Semitism in Berlin5 pointed to the similarities.
In addition, East Germans were used to saying what was officially
required of them. And, as implied, anti-Zionism and attitudes toward
Israel per se were not probed. Indeed, in subsequent surveys the gap
between eastern and western Germany closed quickly.6

In May 2003, the Federal Office for Protecting the Constitution
published a special study on anti-Semitism and its links with rightwing
and neo-Nazi groups.7 The same institution recorded more than
1400 anti-Semitic crimes in 2001,8 confirming a steady rise including
a 100 percent increase for Berlin. Anti-Israeli activities, however, such
as attacks on the Israeli embassy, are not included in these reports
because there is still no systematic monitoring of anti-Zionism.

In 2002, as the neoliberal FDP Party maligned Israel, Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon, and German Jewish leader Michel Friedman, anti-Semitism
became an issue for the first time in a postwar German
election campaign.

In April of that year, the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt
am Main and the University of Leipzig confirmed a new height of
anti-Semitism. In their joint study, 20 percent of the respondents agreed
that "Jews are to blame for the major conflicts in the world," and
another 26 percent shared this opinion to some extent.9

In May 2002, the weekly magazine Der Spiegel published a survey
in which 25 percent agreed that "what the State of Israel does to the
Palestinians is no different than what the Nazis did during the Third
Reich to the Jews."10

As reported in 2003, studies now estimate overt anti-Semitism at
around 23 percent, and covert anti-Semitism as existing among 30–40
percent of the German public.11

In 2002, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and
Xenophobia (EUMC) in Vienna and the above-mentioned Centre for
Research on Anti-Semitism conducted a study on "Manifestations
of Anti-Semitism in the European Union: First Semester, 2002." In
October 2003 the first version of the report was submitted to the EU,
and by January 2004 the final report was in the hands of the EUMC,
which kept the study - with the EU’s knowledge and approval -
under lock and key. The research shows that, aside from the clear
threat posed by "ordinary" right-wing anti-Semitism, Muslims and
pro-Palestinian groups are also playing a crucial role. Furthermore,
leftist and antiglobalization groups such as ATTAC were described
as more or less anti-Semitic.12 The EUMC vaguely criticized the study,
saying that "there was a problem defining anti-Semitism, the definition
being too complicated," as a member of the Centre for Research on
Anti-Semitism told the author. Once again, anti-Zionism was treated
as distinct from anti-Semitism.

In April 2004, as the Conference on Anti-Semitism in Europe took
place in Berlin, the Stephen Roth Institute of Contemporary Anti-Semitism
and Racism at Tel Aviv University revealed that the countries
with the highest rates of anti-Semitic incidents in the world are Germany,
France, Britain, Russia, and Canada.13 Compared to France or
Britain, in Germany Islamic and pro-Palestinian groups are involved
in only a very small percentage of anti-Semitic incidents: indigenous
German anti-Semitism does not need "support" from others. Since
there was never a time free of anti-Semitism, it is necessary to ask
whether the current wave is really "new anti-Semitism" or centuries old
anti-Semitism that has been "modernized" and adapted to the
circumstances. Above all, it is a post-Auschwitz anti-Semitism. For
many people, provided they are not Holocaust deniers or neo-Nazis,
Auschwitz as the symbol of the Holocaust is the obstacle to expressing
anti-Semitism and aversion to Jews and Israel. Hence Germans, like
many other anti-Semites, use the "anti-Zionist" disguise. This enables
declaring Israel "the most evil country" and "nazifying" Israel with
comparisons to the Third Reich, or advocating that it vanish from
the world’s stage. This, in turn, opens the door to proclaiming Jews
to be evil people in general.

These manifestations of anti-Semitism in Germany are deeply
linked to the German past from 1933 to 1945 and the wish to get
rid of guilt or responsibility for dealing with that past. Germany’s
ideological unification since 1989 has two main pillars: a strong
anti-American and anti-Israeli attitude, and a new position toward the
history of WW II.

Rewriting History

For more than fifteen years, German intellectuals, writers, politicians,
and ordinary people have gradually worn down moral and political
barriers that for decades kept the overwhelming majority away from
open and extensive anti-Semitism.

It started with the Historikerstreit, a series of articles written in
1986, and did not end with the anti-Semitic election campaign in
spring 2002. The Historikerstreit was mainly propelled by an article
by the historian Ernst Nolte in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which
portrayed the National Socialist state and its terror as only a reaction
to the Bolshevik threat, and the persecution of Jews and the Shoah
as not really singular in human history. (Jürgen Habermas, a representative
of the Critical Theory school and intellectual descendant of
Theodor Adorno, sharply protested Nolte’s claims.) Germany is a
country with far more memorials and museums to the concentration
camps, as well as Jewish museums, than other European countries.
The volume of Holocaust education in schools and other educational
institutions, the number of conferences and workshops devoted to the
subject, seems close to unique in Europe. As Yehuda Bauer, chief
historian of Yad Vashem, said in an interview:

Germany is most active in promoting Holocaust education for which
there is a very good reason. Given their history, they understand the
importance of education as a means of preventing future disasters.
The Holocaust today serves as a symbol for what we ought to oppose:
racism, genocide, mass murder, ethnic hatred, ethnic cleansing,
anti-Semitism and group hatred.14

Nevertheless, the opposition to inhumanity in general is no obstacle
to German anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Holocaust education
in Germany may be intensive, but most of the textbooks use cliche's
and stereotypes. Moreover, many of the teachers convey compassion
for the murdered Jews along with strong reservations toward the Jews
of today and, of course, the anti-Israeli attitude. Although Germany
is proud of its well-developed culture of Holocaust remembrance and
education, which for many years was seen as a force against
anti-Semitism, the latter force has gone weak. It was a fallacy to think
that knowledge about the Shoah would lead people to love their
neighbors or even their Jewish neighbors. Holocaust education in
Germany is being slowly but steadily undermined by the new trend
of seeing Germans themselves as victims, with many people feeling
that they are fed up with the Shoah.15 Well-intended rituals and remembrances
have not proved an effective shield against anti-Semitism and
the rewriting of history. This widespread "victim" trend in Germany
needs to be monitored carefully, since in the long run it may lead to
a rewriting of the history of WW II and, in the worst case, to a
minimization of the Shoah.

The leading figure among the German "new historians" is Jörg
Friedrich, who has published two books on the Allied bombings of
Germany.16 The first book deals with the strategy of the Allied bombings
and condemns them as inhuman and pointless. Friedrich’s popularized
style helped this book become a bestseller. He uses terms that
for decades were associated with Nazi persecution and the Shoah;
thus, cellars and air-raid shelters in which Germans died are "crematoria,"
an RAF bomber group is an Einsatzgruppe, and the destruction
of libraries during the bombings constitutes Bücherverbrennungen. In
this way the Shoah is minimized through language.

Friedrich’s second book was also a bestseller and also depicts
Germans as victims. There are no SA men, no SS, no soldiers involved
in persecution, murder, and "aryanization." The book contains horrifying
photos of the effects of the Allied bombings of Germany. Ruins,
burnt bodies, and ashes everywhere evoke associations with the Warsaw
Ghetto after its liquidation in 1943 and well-known images from
Auschwitz and other extermination camps. Friedrich even declared
openly, in several television interviews in winter 2002: "Churchill was
the greatest child-slaughterer of all time. He slaughtered 76,000 children."
Yet Friedrich, formerly known as a serious historian, never
devotes a single word to the 1.5 million murdered Jewish children.

German historiography increasingly portrays Germans as victims
in WW II and not as perpetrators, bystanders, or people deriving
benefit from persecution. The revised perspective on German history -
from the Allied bombings to the Germans’ expulsion from Poland
and East European countries - undoubtedly reflects a historical consciousness
that is newly embraced by the majority, though not new
in itself. There was never any taboo on speaking about the Allied
bombings or the postwar expulsions; documentaries, books, journals,
and films have dealt with these subjects since the early 1950s, and WW
II was commonly discussed in families and by certain organizations.
What is new, however, is the public reinterpretation of history, encompassing
intellectuals and politicians of both the Left and the Right.

From a Trickle to the Mainstream

A few examples will illustrate this trend. In Frankfurt in 1998, when
he received the Peace Prize of German Publishers, the famous German
writer Martin Walser gave a speech in which he expressed his
weariness at being confronted with Auschwitz; he was supported by
large numbers of Germans including intellectuals and politicians.
Jews who spoke out in protest were almost on their own. Four
years later in 2002, for 8 May - the day marking the liberation in
1945 - Walser was invited for a discussion with Chancellor Gerhard
Schröder on "Nation and Patriotism." Their dialogue focused on the
question of whether the Allies of WW I were really the ones responsible
for Hitler’s coming to power. Walser maintained that patriotism
must be based on emotions and deeply rooted in history, and the
German chancellor asserted: "The way we as Germans deal with our
history shall be decided by each and every generation anew." The
decision seems to have been made.

Since the second Palestinian uprising began in the fall of 2000, many consider that Israel is losing the media battle. The Israeli government is frequently blamed for not making its viewpoints known effectively.
Pro-Israeli media watchers are an important source of information for their readers. But above all, they are private actors in the Arab-Israeli public relations war.

On 9 November 2002, the memorial day for Kristallnacht in 1938,
German public television for the first time in years did not screen the
usual quantity of movies and documentaries on this topic. The main
news programs devoted about ten seconds to a historical review. Two
documentaries were shown at around 11 p.m., one on Hitler’s secretary
and the other, not broadcast on either of the two national channels
but on three of the sixteen federal stations, on the Sonderkommando
(Jews forced to work in the crematoria) in Auschwitz. However, this
time the first national channel, ARD, presented the first episode of a
three-part series on the German general Erwin Rommel and also the
first episode of a six-part series on the SS, and although the SS was
portrayed as a brutal organization its victims were absent.

On 17 November 2002, the Day of National Mourning, which is
dedicated to soldiers and civilians who died in WW I and WW II,
parliament held a four-hour ceremony. Tall black crosses were emplaced
in the parliament despite the supposed separation of church
and state. Between some classical music pieces, a young woman read
from letters written in 1942 by German soldiers based in Stalingrad.
During the whole ceremony there was not one word about war crimes,
or about the army units that slaughtered Jews.
¨

Peter Sloterdijk, a German philosopher born in 1947, has stepped
out of academia and become a star of German television. Since 2002
he has had his own show, Philosophical Quartet,17 in which he and his
regular comrade Rüdiger Safranski, a philosopher and writer, host
two other guests to discuss the latest issues. Sloterdijk is known for
an elitist and anti-American attitude that goes hand in hand with a
conservative view of the German past, a synthesis of leftist and rightist
positions. His latest book, Airquake: At the Source of Terror18 recounts
catastrophic events that for Sloterdijk are all similar: the Holocaust,
the Allied bombings of Germany, the atomic bombing of Japan, and
September 11 are the strange pearls on Sloterdijk’s string. He maintains
that the source of all these catastrophes was the first attack with poison
gas in WW I, which, he emphasizes, was primarily made possible by
the German chemist Fritz Haber. With a cynical undertone Sloterdijk
stresses the fact that Haber was Jewish, and then alleges a continuity
between Haber’s experiments and the gas chambers during the Shoah.
Although Sloterdijk does not make the connection explicitly, he implies
a horrible conclusion: that without a Jewish chemist there would have
been no Holocaust.

In November 2002 Sloterdijk invited to his show Luc Bondy, a
theatrical director, to discuss the topic of anti-Semitism. Bondy told
the audience: "After WW II, as small children, we were confronted
with guilt. It was so massive. We as children in postwar times were
under fire nearly nonstop and saw those pictures everywhere. My thesis
is: the only possible way to get rid of anti-Semitism is therefore to be
anti-Semitic again."19

These and many other popularized historical reinterpretations
reflect the fact that Germany is on a path toward self-reconciliation. It
is a reconciliation between the generations, as the gap that opened
between the 1960s leftist movement and the parent generation, who
were accused as participants in the war, is closed; and it is also a
reconciliation between Left and Right. No longer do historical debates
drive a wedge between Germans.

As Anne Applebaum has written:

The country’s collective conscience was enlightened by the TV-Series
"Holocaust" to an extent that could never have been achieved by
historical science and all its publications. What imperative message,
fuelled by emotionalism, is carried by today’s self-reconciliation
trend? The discussion on victimhood has now been extended to
include the perpetrators. In the dispute over the planned "Centre
against Expulsion," for example.20

The gates are wide open to a new cult of victimhood that minimizes
- even without malicious intention - Germany’s guilt for the
outbreak of war, its crimes against humanity (including those committed
by German army units), as well as the uniqueness of the Holocaust.

Misusing the Shoah

The decreasing interest in the Holocaust does not prevent Germans
from invoking it in political debates. The "lesson" that Germans now
draw from WW II and the Holocaust is one of opposition to the
United States and Israel.

It is often claimed that the German public has been sensitized
to realities such as the 2003 war in Iraq or the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict by decades of education on German war crimes and the
Shoah as a unique genocide. The Shoah is misused to oppose military
conflicts, particularly if they are carried out by the United States or
Israel against terror regimes, terror movements, and Islamic
fundamentalism. Once a domain of the Left, anti-Americanism and
anti-Zionism are now embraced by ordinary Germans, reinforced by
the books on the Allied bombings and the like. The extreme Right,
which normally is identified with xenophobic attitudes, has discovered
its solidarity with Islamic and Palestinian "freedom fighters."
Pro-Palestinian, anti-American, and anti-Semitic themes were common
in the 2003 demonstrations against the war in Iraq.

Israel is condemned, but terrorist movements in Spain, Ireland, or
Israel itself are not. The German public does not organize demonstrations
after a bus bombing in Israel, but it does after a Hamas leader is
killed. Israel, and hence "the Jews," are accused of horrendous behavior
that is alleged to be even worse because they are "former victims." In
other words, Israel and the Jews have not learned their lessons from the
Shoah, whereas Germans have learned them thoroughly.

To clear themselves of the suspicion of being anti-Semitic, Germans
accompany every castigation of Israel with the mantra that it
is "only criticism" motivated by a just, democratic preference for
peaceful solutions. The other side of this coin is their claim that because
of the Holocaust, Germans have to side with today’s victims, namely,
the Palestinians. Undoubtedly the best tactic, however, is to quote
leftist Jews or Israelis to buttress their own views. Jewish witnesses
are taken to court against Israel.21

Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism Go Hand in Hand

This anti-Israeli attitude is state-of-the-art in parts of the German
media.22 Photos and illustrated reports present the Israeli Goliath
against the Palestinian David, Palestinian children against heavily
armed Israeli soldiers. We see ruins of Palestinian buildings with distressed
women and children standing in front of them, juxtaposed
with settlers who live in green, opulent surroundings and act aggressively
toward Palestinians.

A 2002 study showed that German media coverage of the Middle
East is often characterized by a lack of context and hostile undertones
against Israel. Not uncommonly, the Holocaust is minimized by
comparing Israel with the Third Reich, blood libels are invoked regarding
Palestinian children, and Zionist conspiracy theories are mentioned.
The study concluded: "German media coverage of the conflict
contributed to an anti-Semitic view of Israel among the German
population."23

At the end of 2002, the Federal Centre for Civic Education in
Bonn followed up with its own study, which concluded that "an
important effect in media is to present Israel and its military power
only to convey the impression that Israel is the aggressor."24 During
the official presentation of this study, however, the results were distorted
and played down. The opening lecture was by Werner Stüber
of the University of Düsseldorf, who had lived many years in East
Jerusalem and taught at Bir Zeit University. He did not say a sentence
about Palestinian terror, but did speak of the "powerful Jewish lobby
in the United States." An attempt to dispute this lecture was stifled
with the words that the lecture backed the position of the Centre
for Civic Education - which, seemingly, did not consider the results
of its own study, and, incidentally, is directly connected to the German
state. As the conference continued, the focus was not on anti-Semitic
tendencies in German media but rather on Israel’s "aggression,"
"inhuman" behavior, and so on.

After the Jenin operation in April 2002, Süddeutsche Zeitung
published a cartoon showing Sharon in front of an Israeli tank that
was identified as Jewish-Israeli with a Star of David. To the left of the
tank was a bulldozer carrying away dozens of dead, emaciated bodies.
UN staff were trying to approach, but Sharon shouted at them, "Go
away, this is war!" The bulldozer with the dead bodies is a clear association
with images from the liberated extermination camps, in which
thousands of dead bodies were carried by bulldozers into mass graves.
The simple message of the cartoon is that "the Jews" are Nazis. As
Deidre Berger, head of the American Jewish Committee in Germany,
noted succinctly, "Israel is under fire in the German media."25

Conclusion

There are various facets of anti-Semitism in Germany today:

Pre-Auschwitz anti-Semitism, found above all in neo-Nazi
circles

Neo-Nazi anti-Semitism, typically combining Islamism and
anti-Zionism

Neoliberal anti-Semitism, combining massive anti-Israeli attitudes
and resistance to both financial and moral responsibility
for the Holocaust

Leftist anti-Semitism, hand in hand with anti-imperialist and
antiglobalization attitudes

Anti-Semitism and, hence, anti-Zionism as part of the new
German claim of having been victims in WW II

There are no effective, large-scale activities against anti-Semitism
and anti-Zionism, and the majority of Germans would not support
them. Although certain individuals and organizations try to put the
problem on the agenda, this is much more cosmetics than a successful
strategy.

As the historian Julius Schöps of Potsdam University put it in the
newspaper Tageszeitung:

Protests against anti-Semitism, organized by small groups, do not
get extensive attention in Germany. Resolutions by the German
parliament to reject anti-Semitism are drivel of the worst kind....But
all those ineffective actions are presented to the world as a strong
defense against the charge of anti-Semitism. The truth is: no one is
really interested in these matters. No one really cares.26

DR. SUSANNE URBAN is a historian whose current research, along with the
subject of contemporary German anti-Semitism, deals with the topic of Youth
Aliyah (an organization for Jewish children's immigration to Israel) during
the Holocaust. She is affiliated with the Hebrew University and was a
research fellow at Yad Vashem in 2004. She is also preparing a book on Jews
at the Volkswagen factory in 1944-1945.

The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect
those of the Board of Fellows of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

The above essay appears in the Fall 2004 issue of the Jewish Political Studies Review, the first and only journal dedicated to the study of Jewish political institutions and behavior, Jewish political thought, and Jewish public affairs.

Published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (http://www.jcpa.org/), the JPSR appears twice a year in the form of two double issues, either of a general nature or thematic, with contributors including outstanding scholars from the United States, Israel, and abroad. The hard copy of the Fall 2004 issue will be available in the coming weeks. This issue focuses on "Emerging Anti-Semitic Themes."

Abusing the Legacy of the Holocaust: The Role of NGOs
in Exploiting Human Rights to Demonize Israelby Gerald M. Steinberg .........................................................................................59

International Organizations: Combating Anti-Semitism
in Europe by Michael Whine
.................................................................................................73